Are you stale? Is your business stale?
I was in a wonderful quaint gelato shop earlier this evening – Café Gelato. I enjoyed the chocolate and amaretto gelato, and I was amazed to see the clerk there (Sara) reading a copy of “Always On.” For those who haven’t read it, “Always On” is a slightly dated but very useful book that describes the impact of the internet on marketing and advertising, from a customer perspective. 
Always On” talks about looking at the customers viewpoint, listening to the voice of the customer, and it was fairly predictive, even though it is a few years old now. 
The book does NOT explain how the Old Spice guy could put about a hundred videos on YouTube, and DOUBLE sales of Old Spice products… But the book explained how that could be done, before Old Spice executed it. The book emphasized the importance of customer-focused advertising and marketing. That is absolutely essential.
So back to the question – Are you stale? You may never want to ask the question, “Are you stale?” It sounds like a negative question. Nobody wants their business to be stale, nobody wants to be seen as unchanging, static, or inflexible. Nobody wants to be wearing an five-year-old dusty suit or dress and nobody wants to give the appearance that they are caught in the 20th century. But what about your business? Is it stale?
You might not want to ask that question either – so try asking this: “Are you fresh enough?” Think about what that means. Are you new enough? Are you current? Are you fresh? Are you fluid? Are you flexible? Are you responsive? Most importantly, are you as fresh as you need to be to keep your current customers, and deepen your relationship with them? Are you as fresh as you need to be to get new customers? Ultimately, are you as fresh as your customers want you to be?
If it is important to be fresh, and important to not be stale, how would you measure it?
This is pretty easy. If you have never asked this question before… you are stale. If your website hasn’t changed in 6 months, you are stale. If you haven’t tweeted this month, you’re stale. If you’ve never put a video on YouTube, you are stale. If you are only now realizing that Facebook has gone from 53 million users to 500 million users in the last two years… you are stale.
If you put a new sign up at a brick-and-mortar business every three years, that might be frequent enough to keep it fresh. But the internet is always on. The news cycle is always on. Advertising and Marketing is always on. The great effect that has is that 
social media, internet and all of its tentacles are a living breathing thing that works for your business 24 hours a day, every day, every week. The not so great effect is that if your business’s online footprint is stale, your octopus might as well be wearing a five year old dress.
Is that an unattractive picture to paint?
Fixing it is up to you. Painting it is up to you. It is up to you to make your online marketing and advertising fresh. Make the decision to ensure that your online presence is always fresh. Keep it fresh. Be fresh. Your customers will know, your revenue, and your success will reflect that.
DO something about your online presence. Do it today.
September 4th, 2010
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Business, Competitive Advantage, Continuous Improvement, Marketing |
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If you are working for someone else, anyone other than yourself, your job is temporary. It may last 30 years, but it is temporary because you are working for someone else. You may lose your job. You would need a functional crystal ball or a time machine to know when your job might end.
Given this challenging economy, and the fear that comes from having a temp job in a difficult time, you may ask yourself, what can you do? This is a complex question because it is really several questions:
- What can you do to keep your current job?
- What can you do to get your next job?
- What can you do to get a new job at your current employer?
- What can you do to have the most job security?
I don’t like asking questions without answers, so here are some answers to these 4 questions. Here are my 4 brief solutions:
What can you do to keep your current job? You can be so valuable that you your employer cannot do without you. You can become the best known, the best educated, the best qualified for your job, and as long as you are not the CEO of your company, you can become trained, certified, educated and experienced at doing your boss’ job, your co-workers’ jobs. But there is more to it than that. You need to help your managers and executives KNOW that you are the most well qualified, the smartest, the most creative, in short, you need to make sure that the people responsible for hiring and firing YOU, know that you are the very best at everything that you are the best at.
What can you do to get your next job? First, figure out what and where your next job will be. Figure out what you want to do, and who you want to work for. Find out what that person or company needs, and figure out what YOU can do to contribute to their success. When you are looking for a job, it is NOT about you, it is about what you can do for someone else. Know what that company needs and be the person who can do what is needed.
Hired!
What can you do to get a new job at your current employer? Here is an important thing to remember. The company that you already work for is likely to be the best place to find a new job. There are two great reasons for this. The first is that they know you. They know your performance. They know your skills, your abilities. They don’t have to figure out anything about hiring a new employee, adding a new person to their payroll, onboarding a new person. The second reason is that for you to get a job at a new employer, your package of knowledge, skills and abilities have to be so overwhelmingly positive that you are worth the risk. Look where you are at, talk to people. Find your opportunity!
Which brings us to my 4th solution.
What can you do to have the most job security? The answer to this question is simple. Work for the one person in the world who would NEVER fire you. WORK for YOURSELF. Find a passion, develop your abilities, learn something unique and valuable, start your own company. Provide something new, something great, something unique, something creative. Figure out what gives you your own unique and personal professional competitive advantage, and figure out a way to profit from it. Charge what you are happy receiving, work at what you are proud of and carve your own niche, whether it is microscopic, or enormous.
If you know what you CAN do – your next question is, what SHOULD you do? That is an answer for another day.
July 29th, 2010
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Business, Competitive Advantage, Life, Marketing, People |
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Fortune Magazine interviewed Jeff Bezos recently in Seattle. He drew a difference between Kindle and the iPad – “I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices, its really a different product category. The Kindle is for readers”
“Amazon accounted for about 80% of all electronic book sales last year” Amazon reported a profit of $299 million last quarter, and electronic book sales are a huge component of that. Amazon has about 600,000 books available, and sells, on average, about 24 eBooks per year, per Kindle. I understand the Kindle. (I may understand it better than investors, who have lowered Amazon’s stock since the recent Kindle price cut.) Amazon’s profit from the Kindle works like Gillette’s profit from selling its latest razors. The razors don’t matter. Sure, Gillette makes money from the latest, but the blades are the real source of profit. That article suggests it, but it is easier to understand when you realize the math behind 24 ebooks per Kindle, per year. Apple hasn’t released numbers for their iPad, but the iPad isn’t limited to books. It can download apps, music, books, and every other “blade” that Apple can make available to it.
So – back to the Ipad. 
From a technology perspective, from a capabilities perspective and from every other perspective, it is crystal clear that there is nothing unique, revolutionary or special about the iPad. I didn’t understand why Apple would build it or why users would buy it. It made no sense to me. The market slice is between Kindle, Nook, Droid, iPhone, Netbooks and PCs is razor thin. Why build and position a device between them?
Yet, for some reason, iPads sell, amazingly. Why? I’ve tried to make sense of the iPad. I’ve tried to figure out why and failed repeatedly. Is it the existing user base? Certainly that has a lot to do with it, but if you already have an iPod touch, an iPhone, an iPod, and an Apple Mac, do you really need an iPad? Conversely, if you have an app, or a song and it is already in the iStore, do you need to sell to the same user-base that’s already bought it? When you’ve seen Microsoft’s Origami succeed at nothing and it was essentially the iPad minus Apple’s marketing, when you’ve seen Dell and HP fail to sell touchpad computers in any real volume, and when you already have iPod, iPod touch, and iPhone – why put the money into development of an upsized iPod touch-like “me-too” device.
I’ve found the answer in a most unlikely place. I was amazed when it finally clicked. I was reading Eddie Alterman’s editorial in the July 2010 Car and Driver magazine. I thought it was such an odd place for digital and technology enlightenment. Shoot, it was in the PRINT version, and I couldn’t find a link anywhere to a web-version. The interesting thing were his thoughts about the iPad. He sees the iPad as the cutting edge slicing the distinctions between print and digital media. The iPad is a “convergence of print and digital values (that) will give writers, editors and art directors all kinds of opportunities to deliver more engaging, more entertaining and more useful stuff.”
The iPad is an animal that eats brand new kibble. Media wants to feed it. Media wants it to succeed. For every small-town or mid-market newspaper that has canned its entire local news group. iPad might be an answer for all the people who want media in the 21st century to find a way to be profitable. Eddie suggested how this one device acts as a shining star lighting up a dark sky – beating back the gloomy futures that writers feared. Creators of content and consumers of content can converge at the iPad. In that place it makes enormous $ense. For media that wants to feed the iPad in a quasi-desperate sort of staving off extinction gasp, iPads, Nooks and Kindle’s are magical. Still – does the iPad make sense for Apple?
Of course, and it goes way beyond Amazon’s philosophy for the Kindle. Look at it this way: If you could sell 3 million razors in the first 80 days - you might not need to sell any blades at all. At this point, I could buy a fair netbook for $300, a kindle for $169, and have two devices instead of an iPad. Those two devices would enable me to read anything, go wireless, Skype, run a bunch of programs, and generally do a dozen times what the iPad does. So, in those terms, the iPad makes no sense. Somehow, Apple sells millions of “that which makes no sense.” That makes enormous financial sense for Apple. iPad = $$$$$.
Do they truly have no competition able to compete with their marketing prowess and consumer evangelism?? Why not? What do you think the next Apple media-consumption device will be?
June 29th, 2010
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Business, Competitive Advantage, Marketing |
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Brian Solis makes a point on his blog that Social Media Optimization is the new SEO. He makes great points, but he is wrong. To me, the funny thing is that it is NOT. Social Media Optimization is merely one component. I think what we want is discovery optimization.
Discovery is an ocean, and Social Media Optimization is just one branch of one river that leads to the ocean. Search Engine Optimization is another, advertising is another, word-of-mouth is another… Every method that customers traditionally use to find – to DISCOVER – are valid rivers. Every method of impacting or producing content that potential customers can use to discover is a river. If we want our oceans to get the most traffic, we should optimize the all of them. There should be optimized video feeds, blogs, micro-blogs, events, magazines…
Admitting that I have a problem is the first step to my personal recovery, and the problem here is that that there is no way to optimize EVERYTHING. Time, Money, Skill, Knowledge, and Objectives are all barriers to optimizing everything. My problem is that these resources are finite. They are limited. At times these resources are scarce.
Jeff Bullas latest blog entry looks at the relationship between social media and content marketing – and he has some numbers and some extremely effective charts displaying what marketers think they should know – what they think they should focus on. These charts show the things that marketers most want to concentrate on in 2010. (as a side note, Jeff”s is a great article also). My question is… WHY are these particular techniques, strategies and tactics the most important?
Given scarce resources, are these methods of Discovery Optimization the most EFFECTIVE? IS there data to suggest that in a world of
I think that given scarce resources, it is essential to put the most effort into the methods that produce the greatest return – the largest streams of customers, the largest conversion rates, the largest purchasing percentages.
What do you think? Is there a good way to tell which techniques and strategies are the most effective?
February 16th, 2010
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Marketing |
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